Acid house spread to the United Kingdom and continental Europe, where it was played by DJs in the acid house and later rave scenes.

In the mid to late 1980s, a wave of psychedelic and other electronic dance music, most notably acid house music, emerged from acid house music parties in the mid-to-late 1980s in the Chicago area in the United States.

The influence of acid house can be heard on later styles of dance music including trance, breakbeat hardcore, jungle, big beat, techno and trip hop.

Deriving from later idioms of acid house, the term was first used by the British music media to describe the more experimental variant of breakbeat emerging from the Bristol Sound scene in the early 1990s, which contained influences of soul, funk, and jazz.

Sometimes tracks were instrumentals such as Phuture's "Acid Tracks", or contained full vocal performances such as Pierre's Pfantasy Club's "Dream Girl", while others were essentially instrumentals complemented by the odd spoken word 'drop-in', such as Phuture's "Slam".

The group is famous for inventing and defining the sound of acid house, a subgenre of house music, with their 1987 release "Acid Tracks".

Sources differ on whether it was Phuture or Sherman who chose the title; Phuture's DJ Pierre says the group did because the song was already known by that title, but Sherman says he chose the title because the song reminded him of acid rock.

He helped to develop the house music subgenre of acid house, as member of Phuture, whose 1987 EP Acid Tracks, is considered the first acid-house recording.

Several accounts claim that Genesis P-Orridge coined the term on the 1988 Psychic TV release “Tune In (Turn on the Acid House).” By other accounts, while shopping in Chicago in 1986, P-Orridge came across a bin of records marked acid, indicating a corrosive liquid, and mistook it for a reference to LSD.

In 1981, P-Orridge co-founded Psychic TV, an experimental band that from 1988 onward came under the increasing influence of acid house.

This period began what some call the Second Summer of Love, a movement credited with a reduction in football hooliganism: instead of fights, football fans were listening to music, taking ecstasy, and joining the other club attendees in a peaceful movement that has been compared to the Summer of Love in San Francisco in 1967.

The Second Summer of Love is a name given to the period in 1988 and 1989 in the United Kingdom, during the rise of acid house music and the euphoric explosion of unlicensed MDMA-fuelled rave parties.

Several accounts claim that Genesis P-Orridge coined the term on the 1988 Psychic TV release “Tune In (Turn on the Acid House).” By other accounts, while shopping in Chicago in 1986, P-Orridge came across a bin of records marked acid, indicating a corrosive liquid, and mistook it for a reference to LSD.

Psychic TV was influential in pioneering the acid house genre, releasing several fake compilations in an effort to popularize the sound, such as Jack the Tab and Tekno Acid Beat.

Two well-known groups at this point were Sunrise, who held particularly massive outdoor events, and Revolution in Progress (RIP), known for the dark atmosphere and hard music at events which were usually thrown in warehouses or at Clink Street, a South East London nightclub housed in a former jail.

Sunrise/Back to the Future were acid house promoters in the UK, one of the most widely publicised.

English acid house and rave fans used the yellow smiley face symbol simply as an emblem of the music and scene, a "vapid, anonymous smile" that portrayed the "simplest and gentlest of the Eighties’ youth manifestations" that was non-aggressive, "except in terms of decibels" at the high-volume DJ parties.

In the UK, the happy face has been associated with psychedelic culture since Ubi Dwyer and the Windsor Free Festival in the 1970s and the electronic dance music culture, particularly with acid house, that emerged during the Second Summer of Love in the late 1980s.

Stakker Humanoid, produced by Brian Dougans (later of Future Sound of London), was a hit not just at influential clubs like The Haçienda in Manchester or Shoom in London, but was championed by mainstream stalwarts like Radio DJ Bruno Brookes and Kylie and Jason producer Pete Waterman.

Brian Dougans first releases were as "Humanoid", releasing the acid house single "Stakker Humanoid".

Stakker Humanoid, produced by Brian Dougans (later of Future Sound of London), was a hit not just at influential clubs like The Haçienda in Manchester or Shoom in London, but was championed by mainstream stalwarts like Radio DJ Bruno Brookes and Kylie and Jason producer Pete Waterman.

The Haçienda is associated with the rise of acid house and rave music.

Adam Paul Tinley (born 1968), known professionally as Adamski, as well as Sonny Eriksson, is an English DJ, musician, singer and record producer, prominent at the time of acid house for his tracks "N-R-G" and "Killer", a collaboration with Seal.

P-Orridge's role is disputed by music journalist Simon Reynolds, who calls it a "self-serving myth", and by Psychic TV band member Fred Giannelli, who suggested that "Gen has made this claim so many times in interviews that he actually believes his own bullshit."

This led to Giannelli eventually travelling to London to join the band in 1988, arriving just in time for the Acid House craze.